Far from the short story collection my House of Stratus edition pictured here promises on the back cover, The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) is the eighth novel to feature R. Austin Freeman’s “medico-legal hermaphrodite” Dr. John Thorndyke and an inverted mystery to boot — a particular delight to discover, because I’ve been giving this form of detective story a lot of thought lately. And so when Varney — I don’t think we ever learn his first name — murders Dan Purcell on a boat in the opening chapter and begins to put in place that which makes it seem the dead man has fled of his own accord, I was even more delighted than I usually am at the start of a Thorndyke tale.

Of course, a man cannot simply disappear without questions being asked, and so Varney begins “weaving around him[self] a defensive web of illusory appearances, laying down false tracks that lead always away from himself, never suspecting that the web may at last become as the fowler’s snare, that the false tracks may point the way to the hounds of destiny”. As the book progresses, and as more schemes must be dreamt up by the versatile Varney, it’s amusing to see the apparent success of his endeavours, and the difficulties he imagines he is causing Thorndyke, going to his head:

[A]gain he was conscious of a sense of power, of omniscience. Here was this learned, acute lawyer and scientist looking in all innocence at the very scene on which he, Varney, had looked as he was washing the stain of Purcell’s blood from the sail. Little did he dream of the event which this aquatint commemorated! For all his learning and his acuteness, he, Varney, held him in the hollow of his hand.

Because, of course, the true fun of this is in seeing Thorndyke so effortlessly pick apart the obfuscation thrown his way, with the sort of magnificent reasoning that feels like lightning being handed down from the gods. Initially engaged purely because the vanished man causes difficulties for his wife — or maybe widow, no-one’s quite sure — Maggie, it’s only as the plot grinds, and Varney seeks to provide more evidence of Purcell’s health and sanity, that Thorndyke comes to suspect foul play, picking apart the nature, manner, and malefactor of suspected murder by the book’s halfway point. And then, since “no jury would entertain for a moment the guilt of the accused on such evidence as Thorndyke could offer”, it becomes a matter of proving his exceptionally well-founded suspicions.

It’s all very gentle, and gentlemanly, stuff, with Thorndyke evincing a “grim appreciation” for the nature of Varney’s ruse, and the whole thing at times becoming even more of an explicit game than most Golden Age novels would ever have admitted:

In spite of himself, [Thorndyke] could not but like Varney; and this playful, sporting attitude in respect of a capital crime appealed to him as a new experience.

The slightly stiff formality of it all is loosened by some of Freeman’s typically adroit characterisation — c.f. the lawyer Mr. Penfield, to whose “orthodox legal mind this prying into concrete facts and physical properties was rather distasteful.” — not least on the part of Thorndyke, who is quite happy to be viewed ineffectual if it means he gets his man in the long run. “To no man does a difficult thing look so easy as to one who is totally unable to do it,” Freeman tells us at one point, and that almost seems like the perfect encapsulation of the book as a whole.

You’ll have to swallow one huge coincidence, but then you often do in Freeman’s best work, and this is more than made up for by his intelligent speculation on the apparent imperfection of photography and the minutely-examined processes by which misdirection is achieved, and then unpicked, time and again. There’s also a rather sweet love story at the heart of this, and Varney is a far more sympathetic murderer than one might expect, thrown not into mental turmoil by his act but instead wondering, almost wearily, when he’ll finally be free of the coils in which he has entwined himself by his actions.

The ne plus ultra of Freeman’s inverted novels remains Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930), which has some of its themes and principles explored here, almost as if the idea was glimmering in Freeman’s mind without quite yet coming into focus. Anyone wishing to see classic, old-school, intelligent scientific detection applied rigorously and with minimum fuss, however, could do a damn sight worse than The Shadow of the Wolf. It warms my heart to think that someone went to the effort of dreaming up and constructing books like this, and Freeman will remain a favourite for many years on account of his work with Thorndyke and Co. I look forward to our next encounter eagerly.

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John @ Pretty Sinister: [D]espite what might have been yet another droning, boring book I found it utterly fascinating. There’s a paradox worthy of Father Brown. It’s one of the few Thorndyke novels that I found truly suspenseful. Another of Freeman’s inverted detective novels we therefore know the identity of the murderer in The Shadow of the Wolf from the outset. Thorndyke’s methods, however, are so odd and unusual in this novel, a nautical mystery about ships and the sea, that I was transfixed.

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